Electrical Engineer, Avionics
Zipline · San Francisco, United States · 1mo ago
About Zipline
Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service. We are on a mission to serve all humans equally by ensuring access to food, medicine and essential goods anytime, anywhere. We design, build, and operate the world’s largest autonomous logistics system, delivering critical supplies quickly and reliably. Today, Zipline operates on four continents, makes a delivery somewhere in the world every 30 seconds, and has completed millions of deliveries to date, including blood, vaccines, medical supplies, food, and retail products.
Our customers include the world’s largest and most prominent healthcare systems, governments, retailers, restaurants and global businesses who rely on us to save lives, reduce emissions, increase economic opportunity, and provide delivery from point A to point B as fast as possible. The drone is only 15% of what we’ve built to enable seamless, reliable, global operations.
Our system strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and gives people time back. With more than 140 million commercial autonomous miles safely flown, Zipline is redefining access to healthcare, consumer products, and food across the globe.
We operate at a global scale and are looking for practical problem solvers who thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth. Our team is motivated by building systems that have a direct, meaningful impact on people’s lives and by scaling the future of logistics. We are seeking people who sculpt from first principles, enjoy facing adversity, and can do the impossible at record breaking speeds.
About You and The Role
Zipline designs, manufactures, and operates autonomous delivery systems that depend on reliable avionics, sensing, communications, power, and ground-support hardware. These systems must work in the real world, at fleet scale, across changing environments, manufacturing variation, field operations, and rapid product evolution.
As an Electrical Engineer on the Avionics team, you will contribute to the design, integration, validation, and release of electrical hardware for aircraft and supporting ground systems. You will work closely with experienced electrical, mechanical, firmware, software, manufacturing, test, quality, supply-chain, and operations teams to build hardware that is safe, robust, manufacturable, and ready for real-world use.
This is a hands-on entry-level role for someone with strong electrical engineering fundamentals and practical experience from internships, co-ops, research, capstone projects, competition teams, or personal builds. You should be excited to learn quickly, work carefully in the lab, and grow into deeper subsystem ownership over time.
What You'll Do
- Contribute to the design and development of avionics and ground-support PCBAs, including digital, analog, sensing, communications, power, and control circuits.
- Support schematic capture, component selection, interface definition, and board-level integration with guidance from experienced engineers.
- Help bring up new boards, run bench tests, collect data, and summarize results to support design validation and release decisions.
- Work with PCB layout, mechanical engineering, and firmware teams to close interface, packaging, thermal, and manufacturability issues.
- Support validation testing, troubleshooting, and root-cause investigations for issues found during bring-up, qualification, manufacturing, or flight test.
- Contribute to requirements, test procedures, design documentation, release packages, and change-control records for avionics hardware.
- Participate in design reviews and learn to evaluate tradeoffs across performance, reliability, manufacturability, weight, power, and cost.
- Work with manufacturing, test, quality, and operations teams to support prototype builds, production readiness, and fielded hardware improvements.
- Build good engineering judgment by asking questions early, documenting work clearly, and following problems through to resolution.
What You'll Bring
- Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, or a related field with 1-3 years of industry experience.
- Strong fundamentals in analog, digital, mixed-signal, power, sensing, and communication circuits.
- Hands-on experience through coursework, internships, or projects with PCBAs, schematic capture, board bring-up, electrical debugging, or hardware validation.
- Ability to use common lab equipment such as oscilloscopes, multimeters, power supplies, logic analyzers, or electronic loads.
- Ability to read schematics, datasheets, test plans, and basic layout or manufacturing documentation.
- Familiarity with structured debugging, documenting results, and communicating technical findings clearly.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, attention to detail, and a willingness to learn from feedback.
- Ability to collaborate onsite regularly with hardware, manufacturing, and test teams in South San Francisco.
Nice to Have
- Internship or project experience in avionics, aerospace, drones, robotics, automotive electronics, satellites, or other high-reliability hardware.
- Experience with Altium Designer for schematic capture, PCB layout review, or release package generation.
- Experience with Python, MATLAB, or similar tools for test automation, data analysis, or lab-equipment control.
- Familiarity with embedded firmware development in C or C++, especially for board bring-up, diagnostics, or hardware-software integration.
- Familiarity with CAN, UART, SPI, I2C, Ethernet, GNSS, radios, power electronics, battery systems, or sensor interfaces.
- Exposure to environmental or reliability testing such as vibration, thermal cycling, or EMI/EMC-related work.
What Else You Need To Know
The starting salary for this role is $130,000 - $186,000. Zipline is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws or our own sensibilities.
We value diversity at Zipline and welcome applications from those who are traditionally underrepresented in tech. If you like the sound of this position but are not sure if you are the perfect fit, please apply!
Voluntary Self-Identification
For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.
As set forth in Zipline ’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.